Why did I apply for this Antioch co-op job? I had never worked on a newspaper at school, but by this time in my life, I was reading them avidly. I even subscribed to the Antioch Record while I was dropped out and had a letter to the editor published. It was exciting to see my name and clever words in print.
But the primary reason? I wanted to be in New York City. Jack and I were still a couple, and after we’d made a weekend trip to New York the previous winter, before I went back to school, he had decided the city was where he wanted to be. In May, he found his way there, via a two-week-long detour to Antioch, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In New York, he got a job as a waiter at a coffee shop at the Hotel Meurice on West 58th Street. I spent the break between spring and summer quarter with him in New York and throughout my summer quarter on campus, I made three trips to see him—someone was always driving to New York for the weekend. Was I in love? I don’t know, but I was certainly in lust. We had great sex, and our senses of humor meshed delightfully.
The New York Times job was for upper-classmen; I applied, was accepted, and reported for work on September 28 — and moved in with Jack on the Upper West Side.
The job
I was a copy”boy”—even though I was a girl. There just was no job title of copygirl, and I was the only female in my role on the news floor. The newsroom was immense, stretching from 43rd to 44th Street, and we copyfolk (there were three or four other copyboys, all around my age) stood near one end, waiting to be called to work.
Our duties were simple: wait for a copyeditor on one of the three nearby desks — city, national, foreign — to call out, “Copy!” One of us would hurry over and take the marked-up story, on one or more sheets of paper, and return to our stand. There, we’d roll up the story, place it in a plastic case, latch the case and place it in a pneumatic tube that would whisk it upstairs to the composing room. We did this many times a day, and while we waited for the call of “Copy!” we read the day’s paper, joked with each other, argued politics. One of the copyboys was conservative, and he and I had an ongoing argument when a white civil rights worker was killed; he insisted that that woman should never have gone South because she had children and her first responsibility was to her children, while I suggested that her responsibility to improve society was also a benefit for her children. Neither of us persuaded the other.
These three copy desks were like spokes of a wheel, all pointed to where we copyboys stood. Behind us and behind glass doors was the wire room, where stories came in on teletype machines from distant correspondents and the Associated Press. We would collect those stories and take them to either the national or foreign desks. This is how we learned that Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union who had begun the process of admitting Stalin's crimes, was deposed, in October, just a couple of weeks after I’d started work. That was my first thrill learning the news before anyone else in the city.
One day I got a tour of the composing room and the pressroom. In the composing room, enormous Linotype machines lined one wall. Operators sat at attached keyboards and retyped each story into the machine, which would then spit out hard-type, individual metal letters, and those would be placed in forms by compositors. An editor looked at each form, but because of union rules, the editor had to stand on the opposite side of the form from the compositor and was forbidden to touch the type; thus he (usually a “he”) had to develop the skill of reading upside down and backwards. Each form was inked and a piece of paper pressed on it to produce a galley, so other editors could read in a normal fashion. On another day, I was taken to a large room with a handful of older men reading those galleys; they were proofreaders, but it was strange to learn they were reading yesterday’s paper. They were workers who’d lost their jobs to automation, and this was a union-negotiated way to keep them working. Once they retired, these jobs would be retired as well. Having grown up in a pro-union family, this made a certain sense to me, but I wondered if the men could have been taught a new skill instead.
On another day, I was shown the pressroom, where enormous, and enormously noisy, presses rolled out the daily paper. I had no idea at the time that almost everything I saw at the New York Times that fall was soon to become obsolete — and the unions would have a hard time negotiating soft landings for their many members.
Beyond the three copy desks were rows and rows of tables, four chairs at each with a tall manual typewriter in front of each chair. Here’s where the local reporters sat and wrote their stories. Some of these were rewrite men: reporters out on the street called in facts and quotes, while the rewrite men (and they were mostly men) put the information into a readable story. When the writers were done, they’d call, “Copy!” and one of us would take their story to the city desk, no, excuse me, this was the period the city desk was being transformed into the metropolitan desk. More about this later.
First a copyboy
The first six weeks at the Times, I worked as a copyboy. I learned who the writers were behind their bylines: Gay Talese was extremely sexy. R.W. Apple sometimes came down from Albany, David Halberstam arrived from Vietnam for a few days. Only one woman, Edith Evans Asbury, sat among the local reporters. She was in her 50s and short, almost dwarfed by her large manual typewriter. Almost all of the staff were men, with a scattering of women who worked as secretaries to the top editors. One secretary, I noticed, sometimes worked on the copy desk on the weekends. (I think this was Deirdre Carmody.) She later became a full-fledged reporter, one of the few before women’s liberation led to a meeting with the then managing editor. But that was in the 1970s, almost 10 years after my Antioch co-op stint.
The 1964 national election happened in my sixth week — and my first chance to vote for a president. This was the election between Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had become president the year before after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was working to unite Southern and Western Republicans against what they called the Eastern elites; when he said in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue,” those words enabled Democrats to paint. Goldwater as dangerous. Their campaign TV ad, shown only once, capitalized on “extremism” by showing a small child counting the petals of a daisy, until a voiceover countdown to a nuclear explosion. I had already read about the Tonkin Gulf “confrontation,” which seemed bogus to me, so I was not inclined to vote for LBJ, but there wasn’t a chance I’d vote for Goldwater. I was registered to vote at my parents’ address in Pennsylvania, so applied for an absentee ballot as a student. My protest vote went to Ho Chi Minh, president of North Vietnam, possibly the only vote for him in the state.
Election night at the Times
On election night, I was one of three copyboys assigned to work in the special room set up for election coverage at the New York Times. Many of the big names were in that room: Tom Wicker, newly head of the Times's Washington Bureau and not yet a columnist; James Reston, the former Washington Bureau chief and then an associate editor; Anthony Lewis (I called him Tony in my letter to my parents), another former Washington Bureau chief; and others from the Times’s Washington bureau, as well as the top editors from the national desk. Everyone authorized to work in that room was given a tag, a small round piece of cardboard on a string that we pinned to our clothing — and there was an actual guard at the entrance to keep out anyone who didn’t have the tag. I personalized mine by drawing the Ban the Bomb symbol; no one commented except the other copyboys.
The election room had a direct wire to the headquarters of CBS’s Voter Profile Analysis — which I think must have been either early exit polls or actual counts from precincts — while two copyboys at the 44th Street entrance to the Times building brought up material motorcycled over from CBS. Every time a bulletin came from the CBS VPA, a little bell rang, and everyone got all excited. Even though VPA called the election for LBJ shortly after 9 p.m., there was still a paper to get out and lots of stories to write, so everyone continued to work into the night.
Around midnight, Tom Wicker stood up and in his heavy Southern accent, he declared, “I demand a copyboy go out and get me a beer.” So a copyboy went out and brought back a case of beer, but we copyboys had to buy our own six-pack — or so I told my parents. Can that be true? The Times wouldn’t let us have any of the case of beer?
At 3:30, the third edition was finally put to bed, and I was able to leave. Out in the newsroom, there were piles of the earlier editions, quite a few reporters and copyeditors at the national desk, but the rest of the newsroom was eerily quiet and dark. I was given money to take a taxi; as a young female, I couldn’t be expected to take the subway at this ungodly hour. The boy copyboys were on their own. (Years later I learned that the next Antioch girl student at the Times as a copygirl was the last; the Times didn't want to deal with all these young females.)
Next, a news clerk
Because the Times was a daily newspaper, I did not have weekends off; my schedule was Friday–Tuesday. After election day, I had two days off, and when I returned, I was no longer a copyboy. I had been promoted to news clerk. This meant I spent three days a week at the metropolitan desk and the weekend days at the foreign copy desk. I began to see a bit more about how the paper worked, and also the personalities of some of the editors.
The metropolitan desk. The editor in charge was A.M. Rosenthal, and his deputy was Arthur Gelb. Why was it no longer the city desk? The name had changed about a year before, and I never got a clear answer to why, but it seemed that “city desk” didn’t sound dignified enough. Was this Rosenthal’s opinion? He clearly thought the name was important, because if Gelb called a reporter to the city desk via the P.A. system, Rosenthal would correct him, and he would have to repeat the call, "to the metropolitan desk."
The metropolitan desk consisted of two tables. At one, Rosenthal and Gelb faced the long rows of reporters desks and I sat on the other side of the table, directly opposite Rosenthal. But he did not see me. Literally. I might have been transparent as far as he was concerned. One day it seemed to register to him that a girl was sitting three feet away from him as his eyes focused on me. He asked a question, I don’t remember what; I answered, and he promptly forgot me. I wondered if there was some way I could be more interesting, and didn't yet have the confidence even to think, “he’s an asshole.”
But there was no chatting among anyone at the metropolitan desk. Reporters wrote their stories and brought them to the desk. Gelb or Rosenthal read them, made marks, called the reporter to the desk and told him (it was mostly “him”) how to improve, and then the story was taken by a copyboy to the metropolitan copy desk.
What did I do? I opened voluminous amounts of mail and distributed it to the appropriate people after it had been properly marked. I answered the phone, and you might or might not be surprised at the number of crazy people who call a newspaper. Well, they weren’t always crazy, but their reasons for calling often seemed ludicrous. One week there was a dental convention in town, so the PR person for the dental association called every day to repeat to me the events at the convention that day, even though he had already sent us a press release listing the daily events at the convention. One was an exhibit of Brigham Young’s denture, which was made in 1851 by the first Jewish convert to Mormonism. A blind woman called to express her appreciation for the newspaper helping her find her canine companion 10 years (!) ago, and continued to talk for several minutes. I thought it would be rude to hang up on her, but after 15 minutes, I was told that I should just do that.
The foreign copy desk was somewhat more interesting, but had its own idiosyncrasies. All the foreign stories came via the teletype machine, and in numerous “takes.” My job was to keep track of all the stories coming in, collate all the pages, and when a story was complete, I attached the pages with a paperclip and handed the story to the foreign copy chief. Stories did not come in sequence, either; sometimes I’d get pages 2, 4, 5, then 3, then 1. I learned that a story was complete when a page had “30” or “###” typed at the end. I also learned that there is a right way and wrong way to attach a paperclip. The foreign desk copy chief insisted that the small part of the clip be on the front. It had never occurred to me that one way was better than the other, but I learned to pay attention.
The foreign desk copy chief handed completed stories to the copy editor who had the proper expertise: the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain. The only copy editor I remember is Betsy Wade, because she was the only woman on the foreign, or any, copy desk. (Wade was lead plaintiff on the landmark 1974 sex discrimination case against the Times.) It never occurred to me to talk to her, and there’s no reason she would have talked to me; there certainly was no time. The copy desks were always busy. Even though we were working on what was called the “dayside,” and as a morning paper, the Times’s busiest times were in the evening, there was still always work to be done. There might be chatting about a story someone was working on, perhaps a question of fact one copy editor wasn’t sure of or couldn’t remember, but there was no casual conversation.
How the New York Times was different then
In the paper I wrote to get co-op, or work, credit, I marveled at what the Times produced. What other newspaper printed the entire text of the Warren Commission’s summary report on the assassination of JFK and the killing of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in September 1964? What other newspaper printed the entire text of the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the church in the modern world, in November 1964? What other newspaper continued to publish updated election results for days after the election? Nowadays, in the time of the internet, nothing like these documents are printed in any newspaper, though they might be published as instant books — think the Mueller Report. Much of this information goes online, where it has to be sought out by anyone who’s interested.
Meanwhile, there was personal life
Jack had rented an apartment on the Upper West Side, 82nd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. On the corner of Columbus was a bodega run by Cuban exiles. When Jack went there to buy beer, he thought it was funny to sing revolutionary songs; they just laughed, they were safe in the capitalist U.S. of A. On Columbus was a diner-type restaurant called Joe’s Seafood, where we ate many cheap meals; our kitchen was minimal, a stove so old it stood on legs and maybe only about two feet wide. And Jack found a civil rights group affiliated with CORE to join, which met in a storefront on the other side of Columbus Avenue.
A few weeks after I moved in with Jack, my father, in town for business, called to invite me to dinner. (There had not been a phone in the apartment until I moved in. Jack seemed to think it was cool to be incommunicado with the world.) Dinner turned out to be an ordeal. My father had come by my address and noticed my name and Jack’s name on the same mailbox. My mother also arrived for dinner from their Philadelphia suburb, and they both behaved like any conservative parents of the 1950s, even though it was well into the 1960s and they were far to the left politically.
I got home just after Jack had returned from a CORE meeting, furious at my parents, who would be fine about our living together if we were planning to get married. Jack said, why don’t we get married? I wasn’t thinking about getting married, I had just gone back to college and still had more than a year to go. On the other hand, I was a girl raised in the 1950s. I thought I had to get married — and maybe no one else would ever ask me. I could say yes, mollify my parents, and if it didn’t work out, we could always get divorced. When I called my parents a couple of days later to announce we would be getting married, my father said, “We’re not forcing you to do this, are we?” “Oh, no,” I replied, silently furious at them.
(I called a few New York relatives who I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and Esther, one of my mother’s aunts, married to Morris, said, “Is he Jewish? [pause] Morris wants to know.” A question, to their credit, my parents never asked. And he wasn't.)
We got married at City Hall the day before Thanksgiving, with only our best friend Gerald attending, and went to Top of the Sixes to celebrate. I wore a cream-colored crocheted dress I’d bought at Macy’s (and never wore again) — why did I think I should wear any near-white color? Then we went to Sylvia’s, another good friend, where we helped prep for Thanksgiving dinner the next day, then played bridge late into the night. Very romantic.
A week earlier we had gone to a Progressive Labor party at a huge apartment on Riverside Drive. Jack sat in an Eames lounge chair, and I sat on his lap and told him this was a very expensive chair. I wonder now whether the hosts were among the radical chic Tom Wolfe wrote about six years later.
I noted in my datebook a few movies — Topkapi, Point of Order, Beckett — saw Dave Van Ronk at Carnegie Hall, and the Messiah at Lincoln Center (I had sung the Hallelujah Chorus in high school and loved this music). My last day at the Times was December 26, and we took the bus to Washington, D.C., for a New Year’s Eve party. I took an overnight bus back to Antioch College on January 2.
